Miami Tries A New Free Art School

“Members of the local Establishment, enamored with their smart new friends–collectors, artists, and curators from around the world–want to see if they can get them to stick around. It’s partly about wishing to be taken seriously as a cultural alternative to New York and Los Angeles. But it’s also a bet that fertilizing the creative class is good economic-development policy–especially in a city hit hard by the real-estate meltdown.”

When Everyone’s An Author (A Glut)

“In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world.”

Jerome Robbins – Greatness In The Shadow Of Greatness

Robbins spent 30 years of his life working with Balanchine’s NY City Ballet. “This kept him in Balanchine’s shadow, but on the whole he loved and revered that shadow. It is hard to think of any world-famous artist in history working as Robbins chose to: as great a celebrity as Balanchine or more so, and much wealthier, he used the dancers Balanchine had trained, he used ballet technique as Balanchine had developed it, and his ballets were performed in a repertory that was dominated by Balanchine’s.”